


Snakecharmer

by SnakeSpaghetti



Category: XCOM (Video Games) & Related Fandoms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:27:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23763085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnakeSpaghetti/pseuds/SnakeSpaghetti
Summary: Compiled rough draft from two or three threads; work in progress. I'm going to rewrite most of it. The characterization could be more consistent, and there are other inconsistencies that are bugging me.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 52





	1. Chapter 1

>At first, working alongside the aliens was uncomfortable. Shit, saying “alien” was the first thing to go. They had their own words for us, too, added to the same kinds of lists with the same kinds of complaints. Control wasn't hearing any of it. 31 was going to be the model, the big, shiny, photogenic, easily marketable model. 

>We were assigned office teams: one member of each species representing. And then it was like I was back in high school – breakout sessions, biology primers, language lessons, humiliating interpersonal skill training “exercises,” what you’d expect. But three months goes by and it’s not getting better. We know more about each other’s backgrounds and skills than any of us would like to. Hard to explain the reason your aim in simulations is so good because you practiced drilling your squadmate’s buddies from 400 yards a few months ago. Harder to hear one of your new “extraterrestrial associates” was doing the same to yours.

>Our team wasn’t the only group with this problem. Books only take you so far, you know? We knew how to talk to each other and how to move around each other and what made us uncomfortable and all that stuff (never tap a Muton on the back, ever), but conversation? Comradery? Forget it. Had to get out of the boardrooms and diagrams and planning meetings. Had to get out there in the real world and see what this new society was going to look like. So Control had the bright idea to assign every alien team member a human partner to “exchange cultural knowledge” with on certain days of the month. We could go anywhere in 31, do anything that seemed culturally important, and we’d have to report on our experiences to Control.

>Control divvied us up randomly. Frank got the Sectoid, Pitya got the Muton, and I got her.

>She was two feet taller than me when she was upright. I don’t know how long she is head to tail – has to be close to seven feet. She had bright green scales the back of her, and her face and belly were really pale pink. Her eyes were big, orange, and intense, almost luminescent, with these black slit-pupils cutting them in two. She didn’t have a name; until recently, she’d never needed one.

>I guess that was the ulterior motive to this whole thing. Humanize them, get them thinking like us. Most of them were so heavily gene-edited there was no way of knowing what they were supposed to be, or if there was even something close to an “original” race or people. They had no culture, no language; they were science experiments turned loose. Timid, for the most part, even docile if you figured out a way to communicate with them, but they all had their own personalities left over from whatever memories they accumulated in the invasions.

>I tried to shake her hand but she didn’t understand. I grabbed Frank to demonstrate, but she just squinted and glared at our exaggerated movements. Frank went back to showing the Sectoid the coffee pot, which it was fascinated by, and I tried the handshake again. She never looked at my hand, even when she moved her arm out to take it. Her eyes never once left my face, and every once in a while, she’d flick out her tongue. She grabbed my hand entirely too hard – I knew these things were strong but it still shocked me. One of her claws cut the back of my wrist and I pulled my hand back sharply, cursing. She hissed, loudly, and recoiled, raising herself a bit off the ground. The Sectoid and the Muton bolted, knocking everything in their path aside. Pitya tried to calm them down, Frank was hiding somewhere. And the Viper, her hood out, her eyes locked on me, was motionless.

>That almost put the end to the coed thing. The Sectoid was just outside the meeting room, hiding behind Pitya. The Muton had fortified the women’s restroom, ripping out dividers and cabinets for rudimentary barriers. So far as they knew, the war was back on. The Viper refused to move until I left the room, and even then we had to track down another one to go in and get her calm. Control did their best to lock the situation down – every other team was cleared from the floor for other exercises, containment teams checked and double-checked our vitals and took statements, and each staff member was warned not to speak about the situation to anyone. In our defense, we didn’t. The Sectoid, acting on impulse, accidentally projected a physic message to everyone in the building about how I picked a fight with a Viper. It told us later, apologetically, that it was a reflex to share warning signals with things it considered allies. I tried keeping that in mind when I got the call to the central office.

>I felt like a teenager, getting chewed out by Control. Initiating physical contact was a stupid move; psycho-genetic triggers still haven’t been entirely mapped out yet; post-hypnotic suggestion from the Advent hive mind could influence behavior for years, and on and on. I had jeopardized the entire initiative. They couldn’t reassign me because of the Sectoid’s panic broadcast – everyone in the building knew. They would take any reassignment as a sign that 31 was doomed to fail, that Vipers were too dangerous to socialize, that humans and x-rays were never going to make it together. I had to make it right with the Viper, and make it right in a way that cameras and onlookers could notice, and I had to do it quick like.

>I had six months to show this thing that I, and by extension humanity, wasn’t a threat. They gave me a case worker, some crone named Teague, and an assurance that if anything even near the “Shake” episode happened again, I’d be reassigned to the ass-end of the farthest offworld colony Control could find, or make one especially for me if one didn’t exist. 31 was going to succeed. I was going to help or I was going away.

>Teague specialized in PTSD and anxiety, which was strange because her demeanor was anxiety-inducing in and of itself. To call her “severe” wouldn’t do her justice. She projected absolute authority in any space she occupied. It’s not that people didn’t have questions to ask her, or that they always agreed with her, it’s that those conversations just didn’t happen. You knew by her tone, her poise, and her very presence that her will was to be obeyed.

>I wasn’t a soldier before the invasion, and I wasn’t much of one during, but Teague treated me like a veteran. My marching orders were: establish rapport with the x-ray, preferably starting with something simple, a name perhaps, and then to take her out to the city and expose her to human cultural artifacts. Any questions were to be written in the log I was already supposed to be keeping. I was in and out of her room after ten minutes, bewildered but terrified of going back in and asking for clarification.

>I don't know how well you can picture a reedy 30-something dude sitting across a linoleum table from a seven-foot long snake alien, but if you can, add smooth jazz and the smell of burnt coffee, and you'll have some idea of what it's like to be in the most awkward room on planet Earth.

>I don’t know if it was physically possible for her eyes to open beyond their seemingly default glare. She regarded me with the same unblinking predator stare she did a few days ago, and I couldn’t help but notice her tongue tasting the air every few seconds. I’d learned Vipers can smell fear during the invasion, and that their tongues could not only extend and grab prey dozens of meters away but also determine the makeup of squads from residual odors on whatever poor sap they managed to wrap up. Whatever she tasted coming off of me didn’t relax her.

>I apologized for the hand shake. Her eyes did not change, but she spoke to me for the first time: this, too, she did not understand. I don’t know why it surprised me to hear to her speak, or why I assumed she’d understand something like an apology. I reclined in the chair and stared at the ceiling, Teague’s face and Control’s dire warnings swimming through my head. I dodged x-rays for two invasions, learned to navigate the battlefield like a soldier would, learned to kill even; I woke up every day for months viscerally assured that day would be my last. And here I was now, in a room droning with fluorescent pallor, sitting across from a creature that would have been trying to kill me or worse a handful of years ago, defeated by, of all things, the HR department.

>My name. I was brought back into the room by her voice, a wispy stream of gravel and sighs, when she said my name. She asked if it was a “battle-word.” Putting my own questions aside, I told her it wasn’t. She asked me what it meant when someone called me by my name. I said it didn’t mean anything, it was simply what I was called. At this, her eyes widened and her posture visibly relaxed. She lowered her upper body towards the table, and asked again: why was I called by my name? It went back and forth like this for a little over two hours.

>We learned more about each other than I think either of us anticipated – she was not soldier either. She was a worker-breeder (her words) conscripted from a genetically isolated line of Vipers at the very last month of the second invasion. When the Advent dispersed, she’d gone with X-Com willingly, and had been with Control’s 31 branch ever since. She was surprised when I explained my similar background and spent a few minutes questioning me about the difference between my callsign and my given name. She was fascinated by the idea of being a given name that had nothing to do with a function or job, and asked me to give her one. I volunteered “Liz,” and she accepted it with a solemn air that was weirdly adorable. I could see her becoming more relaxed, and I have to admit I was too. Curiosity, especially when it’s earnest, lubricates conversation better than beer. 

>She did not know what the handshake meant, and explained that no human had ever tried to touch her, or even come very near her, in the years since she’d joined the 31 initiative. She assumed I was attempting some form of mating gesture, which made me laugh. I asked why, if that was the case, she took my hand at all. Her eyes narrowed again. She that among Vipers one of the first greetings one makes among nest-mates was viability; breeding was a central focus of their social makeup. Withdrawing my hand, especially sharply, was a sign that I was dishonest, or that I found her lacking in valuable traits to pass on. 

>I relaxed after all this. She wasn’t a monster, and she didn’t (I assumed) think of me as one either. We’d each been put into a situation that was almost assured to go badly, and, all things considered, a scraped hand and bruised ego were stellar accomplishments. “Liz” and I left the room and shook hands face to face, though I noticed her tasting the air again when we did.

>Teague was unmoved by the progress and warned me not to become complacent – I’d made one breakthrough out of several hundred that would have to happen for full integration to occur. Control was interested more by the Viper explaining parts of her species social mores and encouraged me to engage in more questioning regarding them. Pitya and Frank were happy to see me off the shit list and introduced me to the Sectoid and Muton: Cee and Narx, respectively. I introduced Liz, who forcefully shook every hand she could grasp and did so every time she saw us for several days until I explained to her that the gesture was only appropriate for initial greetings. She proudly told Pitya and Frank that I’d provided her name, and that it was “what she was called now,” which produced endless teasing from Frank, who conspired with the rest of our floor to change my callsign to “Snakecharmer” and leave shoddily-photoshopped pictures of me in a turban and playing a flute taped to my desktop. 

>She hovered around me during work hours, occupying herself with whatever tasks she could be helpful with. Occasionally, she would be called in to the medical wing for examinations, which she disliked, but which also gave me opportunities to ask her questions about the “worker-breeder” thing, since the nature of the examinations seemed to be focused around undoing the genetic lock the Advent had placed on male Vipers propagating. One day, after an examination, I popped the question on her. She explained the whole process to me earnestly, like a model train hobbyist describing the particulars of each car. I learned that male and female Vipers mated seasonally, producing clutches of about two dozen offspring, and the strongest were separated from the weakest, who were consumed. As a worker-breeder, she was exceptionally fertile and was typically tasked with the handling of several clutches of young at a time.

>I asked how she knew all this since there weren’t any male Vipers on Earth. That made her sheepish, and she coiled her lower half into a spiral and flicked her tongue in random patterns. I told her she didn’t have to tell me if she didn’t want to, but she said secrets were not a “Liz-trait.” She explained that the prior worker-breeder of her nest, who had mated with the short-lived Viper King, had told her about the mating process and her responsibilities to that end. She herself had never mated. I didn’t want to press more than that, but before I could change the subject, she asked me if I had ever “clutched.” 

>I don’t know which is worse to have in common with someone: being pulled from your lives to become soldiers in a deadly interstellar war, or being virgins. When I told her that no, I had never “clutched,” she grew more inquisitive. Do humans clutch? How many mates are involved? Is it seasonal? Do we eat the weak ones? Do you select for traits? I was getting more uncomfortable with each question – the birds and the bees weren’t anyone’s focus during the invasion, and having it brought up again so suddenly, and by an alien I was responsible for ingratiating to the human race no less, put the blush on me something fierce.

>This she noticed, and licked the air furiously, asking if I was releasing pheromones. I put my hands up and calmly asked her to let me think for a moment, which put her back in a lower, demure position. She must have realized I was uncomfortable, because she asked me if humans talk about mating the way she did. I said no, not usually. Her lips thinned, and her eyes moved slowly over my face. She said she was hungry. Thank God. I said I knew a place close by and that we could take along the rest of the crew.

>Pitya was occupied at the office with Narx, who’d been working on weapons upgrades tirelessly and was on the verge of a breakthrough. It was hard to get Narx focused on anything that wasn’t a weapon or a potential weapon, but Pitya had excelled in euphemizing many human customs and norms into more martial terms. Narx had apparently made some friends outside of our floor, working with the teams down in engineering under Pitya’s supervision. Frank and Cee were mysteriously absent, and I had to get the story from a janitor. Apparently, Frank wanted to test whether Cee’s psychic merging would work on a willing human participant; Cee was all for it since he’d never merged with anything but a Sectoid before. The janitor said the first probe was the funniest thing he’d ever seen: they did the Groucho mirror skit in perfect synchronization. 

>The second probe is where things went wrong; Cee poked around in Frank’s subconscious, which evidently unearthed repressed childhood memories that quickly overtook both of their minds. Frank had been rendered a wailing wreck, throwing furniture and apologizing to walls, demanding to see his mother and threatening to tell someone named “Bill” what she’d done, and Cee, still tethered to Frank’s mind, performed each wail, throw, and howl in exact timing. Each of them had been sent to Teague, which amused me endlessly until I realized that the night out had been whittled down to me and Liz.


	2. Dinner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Continuing

The streets of City 31 were clean and barren, and the warm night air was buffered by soft breeze. The tech seized from the Advent was insidiously efficient in most of its applications; in the months I’d been in 31, I don’t think I’d seen more than few dozen workers, each one outfitted with the latest in drone and MEC technology. The city was growing at a fantastic rate, and already certain corporate interests had been approved to move in to each capacious district; the area around the Control building was, naturally, the most heavily developed. Liz and I made our way from the building, hopping one of the automated cabs that took us on a route towards a street nearly everyone in the office called “The Pit.” Every conceivable form of food and nourishment could be found somewhere here; foods from the length and breadth of every continent and representing every culture between jockeyed for position in stalls, outcroppings, floating food trucks, and hastily developed diners. 

Vipers aren’t picky eaters, as it turns out. The ride over was long enough for me to thank Liz for the gesture, since it was my embarrassment that led to the outing at all, and offer to pay for whatever she wanted. At this she gave a short, coughing hiss, a laugh I think, and said she always found the human fascination with preparing food amusing. Before she’d interacted with humans recreationally, it had never occurred to her that a meal could be anything more than a brief distraction from other duties. Vipers, like Earth snakes, ate whatever they found whole – taste was something of an abstraction.

I asked if she’d ever had a cooked meal. She put on this thin-lipped sneer and said no. This was interesting. I pushed, maybe more playfully than I ought to have, and asked if she’d ever thought to try one. Her face returned to its resting state, and she crossed her arms in front of her chest, relaxing in her seat. She said, flicking her tongue definitively throughout, the thought of eating anything burnt disgusted her. Meat ought to be fresh, alive if possible, and kicking all the way down. She hadn’t had a decent meal in months –a Chinese joint willing to part with some whole raw ducks had been her semi-monthly subsistence.   
The gauntlet had been thrown; it was my fault we were going out, I had to find her something appetizing. I crossed my arms and relaxed into my own seat, mimicking her pose. I promised if she would eat some suitably burnt meat, I would eat whatever living something we could find in The Pit. She made several more coughing hisses and coiled and uncoiled the back end of her length – she agreed. The cab stopped in the haze and bustle of The Pit, its metallic voice preaching anodyne warnings against undercooked meats and sensitivities to alien palates. 

The shriek of searing meat was hemming in the incomprehensible murmur of at least three hundred newly-minted citizens. Every stall was packed with all types; construction workers jostled in food truck lines with packs of Sectoids, a Floater acting as a caller was shoving orders into customers’ hands as quickly as it could hover through the queue, and a human and Muton pair were animatedly tossing rice and chopping chicken in floating woks; throngs of humanity alternately avoiding and inviting the aliens around them. It was a glimpse at what 31 was becoming, and what it meant for all this to be happening was made physical in front of me. A scant few years ago, every being in my line of sight would have been murdering one another. It didn’t feel real, until Liz tapped my shoulder with the end of her tail and pointed towards the crowd.   
She didn’t talk as we made our way in. She didn’t even flick her tongue out. She slithered in lithe, controlled patterns as carefully as she could. The only time she opened her mouth at all was when a drunken office-mate stepped across her tail accidentally; she hissed so loud it almost sounded like the searing meat in the stalls. This was going poorly. I spotted a quieter patch of the Pit that bordered one of 31’s war memorial parks. A few food trucks and an outdoor grill were enough to draw a small crowd, but they were nothing compared to the ocean Liz and I were wading through now.


End file.
